Posts Tagged ‘kindle’

Amazon Cloud Drive notes

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

I uploaded a pdf and a txt yesterday, and they still weren’t showing up in the cloud zone on my Fire this morning. When I tried viewing the pdf within the browser on my pc at work, it let me know the file had been corrupted and couldn’t be repaired. I deleted the file and re-uploaded it, and I can get a viewer to launch for both the pdf and the txt from firefox, but they still aren’t showing up on the fire. I just tried adding a .mobi file as well. Still nothing shows up.

This wouldn’t be half as annoying if they hadn’t embargoed every other cloud app from the device. Well, they still let box.net in, I guess I can sign up for yet another service, but really, Amazon, you guys are acting ‘worse’ than apple.

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Kindle Fire stumbles

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

It’s not been an impressive product release so far, for all that it happened a day early. First up, the first-power-on registration process was broken and required making a 20 minute call to tech support. Up next is the way many apps aren’t available for the Fire, even though they appeared in the TV add for the Fire, like IMDB. Hell, the front page of IMDB has three different links to the Kindle Fire, but you’d be a sucker to buy it for that, since it doesn’t actually friggin work on this device.

UPDATE: Interesting, in addition to lacking support for the IMDB app, they also don’t support the dropbox app, though they will auto-suggest box.net’s app instead. No Spideroak app either. I’d wonder if they weren’t preventing cloud competition by excluding these apps, but all three use Amazon S3 for their back-end, so it seems kinda random rather than malicious.

UPDATE2: How odd. The IMDB app is suddenly on my home page on the fire, but the app’s page on the amazon app store still says the fire isn’t supported.

UPDATE3: Looks like not a single epub reader is allowed on the kindle, even though there are dozens in the app store, some that even say they’d work on my decrepit G1 phone….

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Uncovertable TXTs?

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

A new kindle curiosity today.  I have some .txt files that an author put up on his website, of some of his classic short stories, for free.  I’ve been slowly kindleizing them, and ran into one today that Amazon’s online converter choked on.  Bringing the file up in UltraEdit showed nothing immediately obvious, so I try resaving as a UTF-8 only txt, still no joy.  Bring it up in MS-Word and save as a doc, and now everything is happy.  Someday when I have nothing better to do, I’ll start chopping up the original txt file, till I find the smallest subset that amazon will choke on, figure out what it doesn’t like.

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More craptastic Kindle service from Amazon / resolved

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Just when you thought the issue was dead and buried, the less than stellar group in charge of Kindle support manages to make a mess all over again.  Seems that they are claiming they never received the damaged Kindle.  Unfortunately for them, I kept the UPS tracking number for both kindles I returned to them, and can verify that they indeed were successfully delivered.  Jeff Bezos, your staff is really making me regret my latest Kindle purchase.  Starting to think a Nook looks sexy, even with it’s silly touch screen.

UPDATE:  I dug up the UPS tracking numbers, which thankfully still work a month after the package got there, and they relented.  for now.  They seem dead set on making me regret convincing my family to go digital with me.

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Kindle Encryption Curiosity

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

There are now three Kindles in my family.  The original one, the 2nd Gen, and now the DX of infamy.

I’ve bought lots of for-fee books from Amazon for each one, converted a lot of Gutenberg-esque free texts for them, and “purchased” a bunch of the free books that Amazon offers as well.  Plus a half-year of subscribing to a fiction magazine.

Lots of content, all scattered about.  Turns out, more of it is capable of crossing devices than I would have suspected.  As someone who works with cryptography for a living, I always wondered about the security implied in the service Amazon supplies, to convert your personal documents into the kindle format.  I need not have worried on their behalf; they don’t encrypt your personal documents, only re-encapsulate them.  They give you a different target address for each device, even when you’ll just be downloading to PC, so I assumed they were doing some sort of differentiation in content sent back.   But when trying to play around with Kindle for PC, I had to set up a separate Amazon account, I discovered that not only were all the personal documents, regardless of target machine, openable by the different account-ed PC, so were all the free-from-amazon public domain books, and the magazine issues.

So, it turns out you can share kindle docs with other users, just not ones you paid for.  Seems oddly reasonable.

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Free From Amazon

Friday, March 13th, 2009

I’ve been harping on Jeff Bezos, the kindle, and the lack of wishlist support (still not there), and swearing I wasn’t going to buy another paid book till they fixed it.  And indeed, I’ve been using Project Gutenberg, and manybooks.net, to get my books for free, reading lots of classic lit that I never was willing to pay to read.

Anna K is a good book.  Madame Bovary has been mostly underwhelming so far.

But today, I discovered the amazon tag “kindle freebies”.  There are 24 pages of actual books, and a few sorta-cliff-notes-esque summary/bibliography collections.  And they appear to really be free, though you have to assign a credit card to the transaction anyways.  Apart from the summary collections, they appear  to be decent quality and unabridged.  I bought at least 2 dozen, including stuff like The Jungle, Treasure Island, and even some modern stuff like Red Mars.  Of course, one of the first books I bought was the combo of Red Mars/Green Mars, so that one was more a curiosity.

There are a couple of romance novels by current authors, that seem to be available for free to get you hooked on the author.  Hopefully more authors will try this.

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Some People Just Don’t Want My Money

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

When I unsubscribed from the paper version of Asimov’s, I specifically suggested letting me know when they had kindle support.  I just happen to be browsing the magazine selection for kindle today, and find that they are now available.

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Sold Another Kindle For Jeff

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

I swore I’d be an anti-evangelist after I discovered the lack of wishlist support, and the annoying excuses amazon gives for why it doesn’t work, but then someone caught me in a good mood while I was out eating and reading, and I couldn’t help but sell him on how much better the kindle is than the sony e-reader.  When I left, he was planning on going straight home to buy one for his daughter.

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Amazon Idiocy Continues

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

It appears that amazon views the idea of wishlists for kindle owners as some sort of state secret.  After first getting a completely useless response from support, I was able to get thru to someone who went to great lengths to do a pathetic attempt at a “wink-and-a-nod” not-denial that there might ever be such a feature, in the future, at this time. blah blah blah.  

What The Hell?!?

I get it, your programming staff was lazy or incompetent, when it came to the wishlist integration, and a lazy project lead/manager said, “well hell, they can use gift certificates, so what if they’re impersonal, loathed, and attach stigma to the giver, I’ve got a schedule to keep, and damn the customers!!”.  I get that you can’t come out and be THAT honest.  But come on, “At this time, we have no further details to announce at this time regarding this option”?

 

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Jeff Bezos, what were you thinking?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

So, I was explaining the kindle to my mom recently, and she asked me a question, “If I buy a book for your kindle, is amazon’s website smart enough to prevent me from buying something you already bought?”.  I assured her that Amazon wasn’t that stupid, and that I was sure it would manage my wishlist sanely.  Then I went home and started looking into it, and discovered that Mr Bezos, in all his crack-whackery, decided that kindle users don’t have friends or family that love them,  I guess.  It seems that you CAN’T give a kindle book as a gift to someone who owns a kindle device.  

Frankly, I’m aghast with flabergastery.     Books as gifts is hardly a corner-case scenario.  It seems like the kind of functionality an e-book system shouldn’t ship without on day-one, much less at the half-year mark.

DRM headaches, I can deal with, but such a moronic decision as to deliberately not allow people to give you the money they’ve decided to spend?   That’s the kind of thing that pisses me off.  You don’t want people to give me gifts, Mr Bezos?  Well then fine, I’m not giving anyone a gift thru your system ever again.

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